Hi Nick, no you’re totally right. So firstly both methods have their downfalls. Reusable products, able to be recycled at their end of life, may require a larger footprint to create than a cheaper throwaway version. This means that the reusable product has to be used a certain amount of times before it becomes more sustainable, could be ten times could be 1000. It depends on that whether it’s a useful way to go.

With regards to biodegradables, it’s a really tricky one. I can’t speak for other countries but I’m based in the UK, and we have very little infrastructure to treat biodegradable materials. There’s a huge misconception amongst consumers that those products will just vanish after 90 days for example. Actually, they need to end up in certain treatment plants with the exact conditions required to biodegrade. I think there are maybe 3 in this entire country. We, as a society, love to throw a lazy solution out there and get complacent.

You make a good point, our society is really good at creating things from scratch and doing it cheaply and quickly. It’s going to be difficult to become focused on reuse and being more resourceful. I think the answer to your question is as always to balance the pros and cons. We have to constantly be critical. Even when we want to believe that reuse is always better, it may not be. There may be a biodegradable product that negatively impacts the environment but less so than the reusable product that needs to be used 100 times to become sustainable but it only used twice and there are no systems in place to re-manufacture.

If we can build really effective systems around biodegradables and ensure that the products we’re labelling as ‘biodegradable’, actually biodegrade fairly quickly and completely, then I believe it can be a useful tool.